In a typical inkjet recording or printing system, ink droplets are ejected from a nozzle at high speed towards a recording element or medium to produce an image on the medium. The ink droplets, or recording liquid, generally comprise a recording agent, such as a dye or pigment, and a large amount of solvent. The solvent, or carrier liquid, typically is made up of water, an organic material such as a monohydric alcohol, a polyhydric alcohol, or mixtures thereof.
An inkjet recording element typically comprises a support having on at least one surface thereof an ink-receiving or image-forming layer, and includes those intended for reflection viewing, which have an opaque support, and those intended for viewing by transmitted light, which have a transparent support.
While a wide variety of different types of image-recording elements for use with inkjet devices have been proposed heretofore, there are many unsolved problems in the art and many deficiencies in the known products which have limited their commercial usefulness.
It is well known that in order to achieve and maintain photographic-quality images on such an image-recording element, an ink-jet recording element must be readily wetted so there is no puddling, i.e., coalescence of adjacent ink dots, which leads to non-uniform density; exhibit no image bleeding; exhibit the ability to absorb high concentrations of ink and dry quickly to avoid elements blocking together when stacked against subsequent prints or other surfaces; exhibit no discontinuities or defects due to interactions between the support and/or layer(s), such as cracking, repellencies, comb lines and the like; not allow unabsorbed dyes to aggregate at the free surface causing dye crystallization, which results in bloom or bronzing effects in the imaged areas; and exhibit an optimized image fastness to avoid fade from contact with water or radiation by daylight, tungsten light, or fluorescent light.
Given the wide range of ink compositions and ink volumes that a recording element needs to accommodate, these requirements of inkjet recording media are difficult to achieve simultaneously.
While a wide variety of different types of image-recording elements have been proposed heretofore, there are many unsolved problems in the art and many deficiencies in the known products which have limited their commercial usefulness. For example, the recording element must be capable of absorbing or receiving large amounts of ink applied to the image-forming surface of the element as rapidly as possible in order to produce recorded images having good quality, including high optical density and low coalescence, and that can be handled without smearing shortly after printing. Large amounts of ink are often required for printing high quality, photographic-type images.
Inkjet recording elements are known that employ porous single layer or multilayer coatings that act as suitable image receiving layers on one or both sides of a porous or non-porous support. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,489,008 discloses an ink-permeable polyester microvoided substrate having thereon a porous image receiving layer having interconnecting voids. Although this inkjet recording element provides fast ink drytimes and good image density when printed with a desktop inkjet printer containing dye-based inks, the drytimes and image quality (coalescence) can suffer when harsher printing conditions, such as wide format inkjet printing with pigmented inks, are used.
It is an object of this invention to provide an inkjet recording element that has a fast ink dry time. It is another object of this invention to provide an inkjet recording element that has good image density.